But one comment in particular caught my attention, probably because I heard it several times, mostly from people opposed to the president's action. "Your grandparents came to this country legally," they said. "So did mine. If they could do it then, people can do it now."
While it's true my grandparents emigrated from Ireland "legally," that doesn't tell the whole story. All four of them came to this country before 1921 (although it turns out my father's mother was actually born in the Bronx and had returned to Ireland as an infant, and apparently didn't know it). But in their time, there was virtually no such thing as an "illegal immigrant" -- unless you came from China. People were just "immigrants."
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| Image courtesy Scholastic.com |
When my grandfather on my mother's side arrived at Ellis Island, he was asked a set of 29 questions ("Are you an anarchist?") and given a physical. Once he passed -- you couldn't have a communicable disease, a mental illness or permanent defect or disability -- he paid a $3 customs fee, his papers were stamped and he was sent on his way. The whole process took a couple hours.
All that changed in 1921, when the first broad quotas were instituted in the face of the "Red Scare" -- the fear communists would export their revolution from Europe to the United States. But the other shoe really dropped in 1924 with the passage of the Johnson-Reed Act, which limited the immigration of Eastern Europeans, Southern Europeans and Jews to 3 percent of their total U.S. population as of the census of 1890, severely restricted the immigration of Africans, and barred entry to Arabs, Asians and people from India.
The rationale behind the Act is staggering to our modern sensibilities: charitably, it can be called xenophobia. Realistically, and more accurately, it was rabid racial and religious prejudice. By using the 1890 census as the benchmark, Congress made it almost impossible for European Jews to emigrate to the United States, which was the idea all along. Other Europeans suddenly faced unprecedented, and daunting, barriers. And still other ethnic groups -- most notably Asians -- were singled out and barred by name.
In our modern era, the serious debate over what to do about undocumented immigrants usually revolves around more sensible issues: access to taxpayer-funded social services and public education, the impact of immigration on the labor market and the wider economy, and whatever threats some undocumented immigrants might pose to national security either through criminal activity (mostly drug related) or ties to terrorist organizations. All of those are legitimate issues and should -- indeed, must -- be addressed.
Yet some politicians insist on pushing the image of people wading across the Rio Grande as the sole "face of immigration." While no one could possibly doubt the 300,000 people or so who cross back and forth annually in just that way, or the many millions of Mexicans living here now without proper documentation, focusing exclusively on that one facet of the issue ignores some other important dimensions. One is the large number of immigrants who came to this country with a valid visa and simply stayed after it expired. Another is the reality of the many undocumented immigrants, regardless of their countries of origin, who have been here so long they've started and raised families; their children are native-born American citizens whose parents are subject to deportation. A third are the large number of businesses, especially in high-tech, who rely on a global supply of talent but who find it increasingly challenging to navigate the visa rules and keep their foreign employees here.
All of those issues cry for comprehensive and effective immigration reform. That means legislation. But to craft something fair, effective and humane, our representatives need to objectively judge current circumstances for what they are and refrain from using the kind of inflammatory rhetoric guaranteed to cloud the issue. The statistics on immigration are the place to start, and the facts are there for those who care to look.
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| Image courtesy Scholastic.com |
About 59 percent of the estimated 11.5 million unauthorized immigrants currently in the country are indeed from Mexico. For most people, thanks in large part to Washington's heated dialogue, the debate on immigration is all about them and the issue starts and ends there. But according to a 2011 Department of Homeland Security study, a further 1.3 million are from Asia, 800,000 from South America, 300,000 from Europe (including maybe as many as 250,000 from Ireland) and the rest from other parts of the world. The only difference among these groups are their respective nations of origin; otherwise, the "illegal" from Mexico is no different than one from Mumbai, or Madrid, or Montevideo, or Montreal.
Had any of them come in my grandparents' day, no one would have asked whether they were allowed to be here or not. People simply came. From the end of the Civil War to the time Grandpa got off the boat, the immigrant population in the United States hovered between about 13 and 15 percent of the general population -- a little higher than it is today.
Now, of course, it's a very different story. My grandparents barely avoided the growing opposition to immigration which culminated in the quotas of the 1920s. Shortly after they got here coming to America became, for many, a crime. Unfortunately, the same combination of racism, nativism, economic pressure and xenophobia which led Congress to pass the Johnson-Reed Act back then is still hovering over the debate, like a dark, acrid cloud of smoke, threatening to pollute the discussion with something other than the kind of rational, pragmatic analysis the problem, and the solution, require. Before we congratulate ourselves on our ancestors' ability to come to this country "legally" we should first acknowledge how much easier it was for them -- then consider the reasons why so many of those who came after have been so unwelcome.
Kevin J. Rogers is a freelance journalist based in Clifton Park, N.Y. He is the former Director of Policy Research and national vice-chair of The Modern Whig Party of America. Opinions expressed in this blog are his own.
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